Somehow, I’ve always associated Creative Commons Corporation with the temperance movement campaigner Carry Nation. I think it’s because both Creative Commons, especially the founder, and the 20th Century booze campaigner have similar goals. Creative Commons furthers the purposes of the Google Nation and Carry Nation furthered the goals of the Prohibition Nation.

Both lobbied the government to impose their respective views on society through the force of law and most importantly get the taxpayer to pay for doing so. Creative Commons, though is much more a 21st century campaigning phenomenon and takes millions from a cast of characters that include the Silicon Valley elites, like eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and direct contributions from Google, not to mention the Hewlett-Packard heirs. And whoever is behind the Mozilla Foundation (also rumored to be largely Google.) Professor Jane Ginsburg of the Columbia Law School has an excellent piece on Creative Commons licenses (Public Licenses: The Gift that Keeps on Giving) that I recommend, and ASCAP’s Joan McGivern has a great piece on the subject which is also a cautionary read before jumping into the legal complexity of the Creative Commons system. We also have a post from 2006 that warned of special issues arising from co-ownership of copyrights if one author decides to use a Creative Commons deed.

This pattern of giant contributions in the campaign against “Hollywood” is old news. Now Facebook is joining in and gets out their checkbook as well, directly and indirectly. This is well documented in the Google Shill List and Roger Parloff’s groundbreaking Fortune article documenting under the table payments by these multinational corporations to the Electronic Frontier Foundation in Google and Facebook’s New Tactic in the Tech Wars.

Back to the Commons

Once again, the Creative Commons Corporation’s yearning toward Big Government dominance was on display at the July 16, 2014 hearing before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet in the form of the testimony of Professor Michael W. Carroll, Director, Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, American University Washington College of Law. Of course given the degree of direct and indirect government subsidies that law schools receive from taxpayers to keep paying law professors salaries…I mean keep turning out law students into a disappointing job market for young lawyers, one questions why the taxpayer has to subsidize these institutions. (Particularly since law schools will tell you that the jobless are always some one else’s students.)

But it should not be surprising that Professor Carroll came to the IP Subcommittee looking for taxpayer pork and this time it was the $105 recordation fee the Copyright Office charges those who file notices in the Copyright Office’s recordation section. One example of recordation is when you transfer your copyrights to someone else. In this way, the Copyright Office is like a County Recorder for real estate.

The law also requires that when an author or applicable heirs exercise their termination rights they have to notify the world of the transfer–a transfer to their benefit–by filing a transfer notice with the Copyright Office and paying $105. Seems normal, right? The alternative to the author paying this recordation fee is that the taxpayer should pay for it out of the appropriation for the Copyright Office’s operating budget.

Once the transfer is given effect, the author now has the ability to exploit the transferred work. Creative Commons has identified a theoretical class of authors who will go through the colossal headache of getting the work transferred (which has spilled over to litigation occasionally) but then hand over the work to Creative Commons or essentially place the work into the public domain. Only a law professor could believe that this theoretical class of transferees is big enough that the issue of who pays the recordation fee is important enough to take up the time of the IP Subcommittee and distract the Members from other pressing business of the Republic.

Yes, Professor Carroll’s most recent search for pork involves the Copyright Office having the audacity to charge $105 for recordations of notices by users of the Creative Commons Corporation’s “deeds” or “licenses” or whatever they are calling them this week to signify that the creator wants to put their work into the “sharing economy” (essentially the public domain).

Sharing is Caring for Multinationals

The “sharing economy” is the antebellum underpinning of much of the Web 2.0 monetary system–artists create a work for free and then let companies like Google sell advertising against it and grow their valuations. This is what Lessig calls the “hybrid economy” (Lessig is the founder of Creative Commons after his stunning loss before the U.S. Supreme Court in the Eldred case. Well…stunning to him.)

Of all the canards foisted on the professional creative community by the professional free riders, none has had such a sustained life as the “sharing economy” dodge. I would suggest that the longevity of the fallacy is at the very core of Web 2.0 right alongside another reality: there is no free lunch. If you do not pay for a product, that’s because you are the product.

How are these two frauds connected? Fortunately, Lessig crystallizes the scam with yet another elaborate rationalization, his speciality. Lessig tells us about the “hybrid economy” in his book “Remix”. And what might the “hybrid economy” be?

“Where commercial entities leverage value from sharing economies.”

Think about that: Where commercial entities leverage value from sharing economies–or more precisely, where commercial entities extract commercial rents (a/k/a “profits”) that are not redistributed to the creators of works being “shared”. In other words, the commercial entity is given a supply of goods to sell and resell at no charge by creators, i.e., by use of uncompensated labor, often children. (The use of child labor raises its own issues.)

Nowhere is this rather demonic paradigm more clearly revealed than in Lessig’s disastrous appearance on The Colbert Report. Lessig found himself caught in a trap and tried to laugh his way out of appearing to be yet another exploitation monger from Silicon Valley. I don’t know if Colbert intentionally set the trap, but either way we got to watch Lessig in a kind of verbal Chinese finger puzzle of Colbert’s making, but composed almost entirely of Lessig’s own hubris (at 1:12):

Colbert: “The hybrid economy is that everybody does the work, and Flickr makes the money!”

Lessig: “Don’t tell anybody!”

This actually is not funny, unless you think it’s funny that you are the product. Then you should have a belly laugh.

On the one hand The Man 2.0 wants to say that the “sharing economy” is a noncommercial use of any copyrights that happen to find their way into the “sharing economy” (a/k/a Limewire, Isohunt, Creative Commons or YouTube). On the other hand, The Man 2.0 wants to extract commercial rents from those user created works (a/k/a Limewire, Isohunt, or YouTube). (You may prefer the machine-analog vocabulary that simultaneously draws attention away from free will and also commoditizes creativity, “user generated content”.)

Those user works may be original works, cover songs, family photographs or direct rip offs of other people’s stuff, but the principle is the same. The user gets nothing, an underlying copyright creator gets nothing absent a deal to the contrary, and the “commercial entity” gets all the commercial value it can extract.

Lessig cites Flickr as an example of his “hybrid economy.” So doesn’t this mean that people who give their copyrights away as part of Lessig’s ‘hybrid economy’–through his Creative Commons “sharing licenses”– can have their works exploited to profit commercial entities without compensation? Is that what is really going on here? After all, when Flickr was sold to Yahoo! for millions in 2005 how much of those millions did the executives share with the people who ‘shared’ their content with Flickr?

Given the millions his causes have received from Google, it’s natural that Lessig would want to focus on Flickr as a distraction from Google’s YouTube, the real behemoth in the “hybrid economy”. Ever try searching for “Casablanca full movie” on YouTube? Guess what you get? Casablanca the full movie, sliced into 10 parts. In fact, try that search as “[your favorite movie title] full movie” and see what you get. It’s probably up there and it’s probably sliced into 10 convenient little parts for you to do what you want with.

So is that a noncommercial use? Perhaps if you look at the pages where these clips from Casablanca appear on YouTube you won’t find ads being served. Does that mean that YouTube doesn’t benefit from having people searching and viewing these and thousands of other clips on the site?

These are rhetorical questions. Here’s the fact–anything that weakens copyright or makes it more difficult to enforce (such as overwhelming the system with a sudden and sustained influx of infringers like YouTube) benefits Google, Facebook or anyone else adopting their shakedown business model.

Creative Commons is a key part of obfuscating the rights and fouling up the system even further. For example, if you were to record a version of the song “Yesterday” written by Lennon and McCartney and put the recording out under a Creative Commons Corporation license, there is nothing in the license that grants any rights to the underlying composition–it is essentially a “buyer beware” quitclaim at best. But it creates the impression in the user of the license that they can make that recording available online under a Creative Commons Corporation license.

Follow the Money

It is difficult to determine exactly how Creative Commons Corporation is funded except at the high level from its IRS Form 990 that typically excludes specific donors. Good news, though. A copy of the Schedule B from the Corporation’s 2008 tax return found its way onto the Internet:

So keep these numbers in mind when you read Professor Carroll’s testimony, particularly the $1.5 million from Google, which has a direct commercial interest in perpetuating the antebellum “hybrid economy.”

Creative Commons and the Termination Right

Exercising the termination right is overly cumbersome and confusing to many authors and their heirs. Creative Commons created and hosts an Internet based tool still in its beta version that provides those with a potential termination right a means of assessing whether and when they may exercise their termination rights. See http://labs.creativecommons.org/demos/termination/

Creative Commons did this to aid authors or heirs seeking to reclaim their copyrights for the purpose of sharing their works through a CC license.

In that regard, one obstacle is financial. Even after an author or heir has run the administrative gantlet, termination is not effective until they pay the Copyright Office recordation fee of a minimum of $105 for one transaction and one title. See Copyright Office, Calculating Fees for Recording Documents and Notices of Termination in the Copyright Office at http://www.copyright.gov/fls/sl4d.pdf.

While modest for economically valuable copyrights like those in a character such as Superman, this recordation fee is potentially cost prohibitive for scholars, journalists, or others who have created and published many copyrighted works that they would like to share with the public through a Creative Commons license.

Creative Commons USA recommends that the Subcommittee consider a measure that would waive the recordation fee in cases in which the terminating party seeks to reclaim copyright for the purposes of making the work of authorship freely available over the Internet under the terms of an open license.

As noted above, the “termination right” is the right of some authors to reclaim their works in the U.S., which is a good thing that I have always supported. (This is the “time bomb in record company vaults” idea which is a topic for another day.) The general idea is that in order for the termination to be effective, the author must successfully reclaim the rights and then file a notice in the recordation section of the Copyright Office that notifies the world the ownership has changed (in the U.S. only, by the way.)

The Copyright Office charges a fee for this recordation as a means of cost recovery of the appropriated cost of providing this service to the public. Given that the current fee represents about 1.5 hours of Copyright Office time, it is pretty clearly an average charge as some recordations will take more time.

Creative Commons–sitting on its millions–has the brass to come to the U.S. Congress and ask for some pork. This is something that clearly benefits big corporations that want the safety from liability they get from certainty that a work is subject to the “free” license from Creative Commons. So why don’t these giant multinationals write a check?

If you believe as I do that Creative Commons Corporation is just a stalking horse for Google and what Eric Schmidt calls the Gang of Four, you will likely have no sympathy for the taxpayer further subsidizing the tax exempt Creative Commons Corporation or its goals. You might even ask why it is that Creative Commons itself does not subsidize these recordation fees itself given the millions it gets from Google.

Of course, writing a check requires knowing who to write the check to, etc., and Creative Commons has gone the extra mile to avoid actually knowing who is using their system. I wonder why?

Even so, this seems like exactly the kind of thing Creative Commons should be doing with their money. It makes more sense than pounding the table in front of the Congress trying to create the impression that they represent authors and are entitled to pork it up with the best of them. You don’t suppose that’s why they get funded, do you?

Because it sure seems to cost a lot of money to give things away for free.